Your Semi-Regular Reminders

Things sports fans need to be reminded of...

Your Handy-Dandy Super Bowl 50 Translation Guide:

Sometimes, athletes, coaches and reporters at the Super Bowl say what they mean. This has happened as recently as Max McGee admitting he was hung over after Super Bowl I. Since then, the game has hidden behind an endless curtain of genteel weaselspeak. But that's OK, we're here to clear it up for you:

Conspiracy Theories For Fun And Profit!

The great thing about conspiracy theories is that they only have to make sense within their own context, which they conveniently create. Once you're inside the bubble, every fact becomes new evidence of the theory and every fact that disproves the conspiracy theory becomes evidence of a coverup, which ends up lending credence to the conspiracy theory all over again. This is how people find themselves believing that the Smithsonian Institute is actively engaged in a massive coverup to hide proof that giant half-alien hybrids colonized the US in the 5th century, among other less intellectually defensible positions. Never mind that it makes absolutely no sense, once you're convinced that those giant alien-human hybrids existed and learn there's no evidence, then logic (such as it is) immediately dictates that the evidence must have been destroyed. The alternative - that there never were any half-alien power forwards lurching across the landscape during the Moundbuilder period and the whole concept is loonier than a pile of Canadian currency - is unthinkable.

So That Was Ugly (Panthers-Eagles Edition)

I'm out of town this week, but I can only imagine the wailing and moaning and gnashing of teeth back home over the Carolina Panthers' extended demolition at the occasional hands of Mark Sanchez. No doubt the drums are beating for the team to do something about Cam Newton - what "something" is, nobody is quite sure, except it boils down to "play better for less money" - and to burn Riverboat Ron Rivera and the front office in effigy for letting Steve Smith go. Sometimes, it is true, riverboats catch on fire and sink.

Sanchez Newtons

Over at Jets Over The Pond, Matt Goldstein (full disclosure here: Matt's my cousin, and I love him even if he is a Jets fan) compares the shambling husk of Mark Sanchez to Panthers QB Cam Newton. While neither of them has lived up to the expectations laid upon them by a hyper-rabid media and both have been dinged for occasionally acting like young men with gobs of money whose whims have been catered to since they were old enough to slow dance with a girl in the late stages of a bar mitzvah reception, they've taken radically different paths to their current level of Not Being The Next Tom Brady.

Charlotte: Real Sports Town

Something remarkable happened in North Carolina sports this fall. No, I'm not talking about Duke becoming bowl-eligible by beating UNC and Coach Hat. It's not the guarantee that the Hurricanes will get out of October without having once again dug themselves an insurmountable hole. And it's not the latest wacky rules change in NASCAR that makes no sense to anyone not part of the France family.
No, I'm talking about Charlotte suddenly deciding that it was a Big Time Sports City. The first signs came a few weeks ago, when the Charlotte media piled on Panthers star quarterback Cam Newton for his sideline behavior during a prime-time pounding by the Giants. This, of course, follows the long-standing tradition of big-time sports cities beating the crap out of their best players, from New York (A-Rod) to Philly (Mike Schmidt, Donovan McNabb) to Los Angeles (Matt Kemp). And yes, the Carolina sports media was inordinately proud of that fact. I heard sports-talk djs bragging on-air about how this made Charlotte "a real sports city".
As someone who was born in NY, grew up in Philly and went school in Boston, let me humbly suggest that this sort of idiotic behavior is the last sort of thing you want to emulate, and the last sort of thing that makes you "real" as sports fans. Newton's a convenient lightning rod, sure, but hey, he's a second year player at the most difficult position in the league, on a team that doesn't have a lot of weapons and no defense to speak of. He already expects he has to win every game by himself because his linebackers sure as hell aren't going to help him; getting mad because he doesn't always pull it off, because he's still learning, because he's the only recognizable name on a roster whose second-most famous player has a bad habit of putting his teammates on the disabled list, well, that's kind of counterproductive.
And so, as a resident of too many cities where the sports media eats its own,  I listen to the callers on "The Fan" and "The Buzz" talk about how it's time to give up on Newton, and how he's a bust, and how it's time to tear down a team that never got built in the first place, and I shake my head. That crap sort of works in Boston and Philly and NY because there's money there, and there's legacy, and there's a sort of "we've-been-married-so-long-that-we've-forgotten-how-to-say-nice-things-about-each-other-but-God-help-you-if-you-come-between-us" vibe. Charlotte doesn't have that. Charlotte's got one basketball team that packed up and left and another one that's literally the worst of all time, and a football team that can't figure out who it is or whether it belongs to Charlotte or both Carolinas. Picking up the worst habits of the old guys is not the best way to build fandom, or to make your town a desirable place to play.
Being a "real" sports town is overrated - ask anyone who endured the Bobby Valentine shenanigans this year. It's a lot more fun being a town that loves sports, even when there's a hiccup or two. And it's definitely a lot more fun living there.